Rambu Hammumata (right), widow of King Umbu Yiwa Waliwanja, and a younger relative stand next to the king's coffin. Photo: Ilana Rose/World Vision

THE door to a darkened room creaks open and an elderly woman enters reverently to lay a cigarette on the coffin containing her long-dead husband. ''The king liked cigarettes,'' explains a village elder, ''so before we open the door to you, we put a cigarette on the box, for ceremony.''

For five years the decomposing remains of Umbu Yiwa Waliwanja have been lying in a side room of his family's wicker-walled house in a tiny village in East Sumba, Indonesia.

The body that the woman, his widow Rambu Hammumata, shows us is wrapped in 50, perhaps 100 hand-woven cloths and sealed in a large wooden crate.

On ceremonial occasions such as the harvest, meals are still cooked and presented to the dead man. The family insists the remains never smelt, even when they were fresh, though it is the custom here to place a bucket under the coffin to catch the liquids of decay.

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Until his death, Umbu was a local king - he owned land and slaves. His body is waiting for its funeral, but first his family must amass the huge amount of money in the form of livestock required to give him the send-off appropriate for a landowner. Only then can he leave the physical world and join the other ancestors as a spirit.

The yard in front of the house is crowded with the enormous stone tombs of those who have already made the journey.

In this sub-village, called Hambuang, Umbu is the only dead man in the house. But in a settlement nearby there are three bodies on hold. The dead often find themselves among the living here, and some lie in wait for up to 30 years.

East Sumba is the poorer half of Indonesia's poorest province. It's just one hour's flight from Bali but 200 years behind.

The ground, radically cleared of its lush sandalwood forests during colonial times, is stony and eroding. The remaining vegetation is repeatedly scoured away by annual burning.

It has a short wet season, a dry season and a ''hungry season'', says local preschool teacher Femmy, when many of her charges are forced to go out with their families to scrounge in the forest for wild sweet potato.

The Dutch introduced Christianity here in the late 19th century but despite a plethora of churches, it has formed a thin veneer over religious animism and traditional customs that still pervade daily life.

Some of these customs conspire to hold people in poverty and misery.

To this day, in some villages in Sumba, kings own slaves and rule their lives. Slave children are inherited - the son of the king owns the son of the slave - and the king is responsible for feeding and clothing his slaves and their families. The king owns the land; the slaves work it.

And here, where wealth is still measured in head of cattle, marrying a woman or interring a relative can come at the cost of dozens, if not hundreds of livestock.

Some animals, particularly horses, are simply sacrificed and left to rot so the king can ride them in the afterlife. Until about 20 years ago, a slave might also have been killed, to continue to render service to his dead master.

Women are less expensive to bury. Those at the lower end of the social strata are often taken out of school in their teens and sold into marriage by families desperate for money, perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

Amsal Ginting, a medical doctor and World Vision's program manager for Sumba, says that scarcity of land and a growing population mean that some kings are now virtually indistinguishable from their slaves in how they live.

But even in reduced circumstances, people who fail to fulfil what is expected of them based on their social position will lose face (kaba mata) and social standing in a society where little else matters.

''Sometimes people have a sick child but they will not bring her to hospital because they would prefer to save the money for the ceremonies,'' Amsal says.

''They go into debt, they visit the pawn shop … Here, sometimes, the dead are more important than the living.''

Governments and aid agencies have begun tackling the problem. Gidion Mbiliyora, the Bupati, or regional leader, of East Sumba, says: ''We are trying to talk with the traditional leaders, not to take away these ceremonies, but to simplify them.''

Mbiliyora says the ''king-slave'' model, which he euphemistically describes as ''social stratification'', is on the decline but acknowledges that they ''haven't been able to eradicate it fully''.

''For those in the low, low strata it's difficult because they position themselves saying, 'This is the master.' But in the day-to-day life, they are seen as part of the family and work together in the clan, so it's not such an issue,'' he says.

Jakarta's regional autonomy laws have imposed a modern-looking system of government on Sumba, but Amsal says it is kings who still take the senior positions. They are the politicians, police and judges, so resistance to change is high.

It can even be difficult to distribute emergency and drought aid because all of a slave's belongings are deemed to belong to the king.

''If a slave gets food from an aid program, it goes straight to the king,'' Amsal says.

In the western half of Sumba, though, which has higher rainfall and more fertile soil, there is evidence of progress. According to Amsal, slavery is increasingly rare, and funerals have been made faster and more efficient - most bodies are buried within eight days.

Tamo Sawola's family embodies how, in western Sumba, times are in fact changing. He was the favourite grandson of the now-dead king, Umbu Sawola, in the village of Galu Bakul, Anakalang. He proudly talks of the massive landholdings his grandfather commanded before he died in 1970. But all that has now changed. Sawola had 11 children; asked how many grandchildren, Tamo laughs.

''Many,'' he says. ''The family still own a lot of land, but because there are a lot of grandchildren we've divided the land up.''

This extended family of the king class has spawned a judge and a number of members of the national parliament and Tamo says, ''Now your status is about educating your children, so a lot of your family wealth is to pay for that.''

But it's clear from the towering tombs in the front yard that when his grandfather died the funeral rites were little short of Pharaonic.

Tamo's grandfather commissioned his own gravestone, and had the people of three villages drag it to his final resting place five kilometres away. It took three months to arrive and was so heavy that some days it moved just one metre.

''Every day he had to kill livestock to feed the workers,'' Tamo says.

Asked if she would be buried so grandly, Tamo's mother, Kareri Toga, says quietly: ''They were much better off in that time than we are now.''

On the eastern side of the island, though, unwinding generations of customary practice has proved more difficult. In some places, people who may be kings by birth but paupers by circumstance still further impoverish themselves in the name of kaba mata.

A full funeral ceremony means the bereaved family must build a house for guests to stay in, feed hundreds of people for up to two weeks, provide animals (perhaps 150 big, fat cows and horses for a high-born man) to sacrifice for food and as gifts, organise the gravestone and provide hand-woven fabrics.

The guests also have responsibilities. Depending on their tribal and marital relationship to the bereaved, they may be required to bring animals and stop all work for the duration of the festival.

Some of these gifts can now be replaced by cash (what's known as ''cattle in an envelope''), Amsal says. But still nothing enhances a man's status more than walking to the wedding or funeral to the sound of congratulatory tambourines leading a procession of fine, fat cows.

World Vision chief executive Tim Costello, who toured Sumba recently, said that, confronted with such practices, aid work needed to perform ''a dance on a very thin knife edge'' between respect and the recognition that ''to deal with poverty, you have to deal with cultural practices''.

In particular, he said, he was ''profoundly shocked'' by the openness of slavery.

''It hit me between the eyes that it is talked about so clearly. In other parts of the world it's much more hidden, there is some shame,'' he said.

''What we know about slavery is that it's very profitable. When other humans every day add to your wealth, you're not going to give it up lightly.''

Back in the household of the dead king Umbu, it's clear that some social mobility is possible. Kabukut Manggading was once Umbu's slave, but is now the head of the sub-village of Hambuang.

He says the king was a great man who divided his cattle among everyone in the village. But the people arrayed on the porch of this house all agree that the good old days are long gone. In Umbu's prime they owned thousands of cattle, but now there are perhaps only 200, and in the hungry season, even some of those will starve to death on the scorched earth, the family say.

It's hard to imagine how they will ever amass the livestock necessary to dispatch Umbu's spirit with honour to the world of the ancestors, and his body to the collection of hulking stone tombs in the front yard.